The flexible body politic: fitter and healthier for what?

[An older draft post. Time to let loose].

A couple of quotes from Australian author of fiction and essayist Amanda Lohrey which nail the mode of neoliberalism she detected in sections of late-1980s Sydney culture. For Lohrey 'new age' practices of self-government are displacements of earlier utopian projects. These new technologies of self focus political-libidinal investments in the individual body because that's the last space of controllable shelter and control in a time of radical reform (a term popular in the Australian mainstream media in the 1980s which referred to the privatising and deregulating policies of the Federal Labor Government).

The title of Lohrey's essay is, of course, a reference to Jameson's famous essay, but something like a Foucauldian interest in the technologies of the self and the rationalities of liberalism can be seen in this essay and indeed in the trajectory of Lohrey's fiction, which shifts from the influence of aesthetic Marxisms like Brecht, Lukacs, Benjamin and Bloch's, to, as I say, a Foucauldian interest in the formations of the body and self, and in the forces of the psyche-body circuit acting in relation to social-historical changes. I think, for Lohrey, it is the role of narrative and language too on these more recent interests that make her fiction fascinating and a good resource to write PhD research from.
























Her last two works of fiction The Philosopher's Doll (2004) and Camille's Bread (1995) move more firmly into the territory I'm attempting to describe above, after the more sustained focus on political party (Australian Labor Party) and State-based politics of the first two novels: The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) and The Reading Group (1988). Effectively Lohrey's interest in the poetics of politics, as Jenna Mead describes it, moves from a focus on the governmentality of state to one on the governmentality of the citizen-subject. Is this shift one that can be explained by her sensitivity to new social forms or is it (also, perhaps) a sign of 'the maturing author'?

From ‘The Project of the Self under Late Capitalism’ Australia’s Best Essays, 2001.

What are these new and emergent structures of feeling? This was something that first engaged me when I went to live in Sydney in 1987. . . . a new sensibility was developing that was a portent of how Australia generally might see the world ten or even twenty years from now. As for my Shiatsu practitioners, they differed from the mainstream only in degree not kind. In essence they were fierce materialists who, through a rigorous regimen of diet and physical training aspired to re-invent themselves by reconditioning their material base, the body – if necessary, cell by cell. They aspired to a kind of utopia of the body, and what could be more Australian than that? They were Zen surfers without the waves. (246-7)

Since then I’ve kept a watching brief on the evolution of the idea of the self as a constant work-in-progress and the concomitant growth of what might be described as privatised utopias; the utopia of one. . . . When all is free-floating, unstable, in a process of being dismantled or alienated from you [Z. Bauman’s liquid modernity], what is it you have left? And the answer is: the body. The body itself becomes a utopian site. And the project of the utopian body is primarily about the pragmatics of health, fitness and diets . . . ‘Fitter and healthier for what?’ (248-9)

Red Toryism and Australia's Neoliberal past

British politics can be a useful guide for the direction that Australian political parties might head in. Thatcher's neoliberal programme--of privatisations, anti-unionism, small government, personal responsibility allied to a strident nationalism and moral and social conservatism--was a model that the Australian Liberal party took up and put into effect during John Howard's prime ministership: 1996 to 2007. Yet, to align the right-wing Australian party to the British Conservatives too neatly ignores a key point Guy Rundle makes in his essay "When the rubric hits the road":

Australia is not Britain, the neoliberal reconstruction of the economy was undertaken by a Labor government, which reemphasised a collective agreement with the nation, and offered some compensation for the effects of economic restructuring. And, by the standards of Thatcher, the Howard government changed almost nothing of the fabric of Australian life. (Overland 197: 9)

I think the subtext of Rundle's assertion here--that Howard had little left to work with in seeking to reconstruct society because Labor had already done most of that work--requires some unpacking. Such a disaggregation of the effects of Neoliberalism on the Australian economy and on Australian society is analytically useful because it helps in understanding why so-called Keynesian responses to the Global Financial Crisis do not end Neoliberalism but have, arguably, intensified aspects of it.

While useful as an exercise in comparisons and contrasts, mapping British political formations onto Australian ones--as though what is geographically distant is also temporally ahead--needs to take the specifically local and national characteristics of the two systems into account. So, in order to get to the main topic of this post--Red Toryism--I will quickly run through an historical sketch of Australian Neoliberal labourism. I do this as I think coming to terms with how Australian society (rather than economy) was Neoliberalised under Labor is a good starting point in seeking to understand what the implications of Red Toryism might be for Australian political culture, and, in particular, a good basis on which to see the forms of governmental practice and reasoning that Red Toryism enacts as being available to any formation within Australian political culture: the Greens, the Nationals, the Liberals and Labor. In other words, to begin to analyse Red Toryism from the understanding that Australian labourism was the carrier of neoliberalism helps to tune out the noise that disavows Labor's embedding of Red Toryist governmentalities. Such embedding might already be occurring, and whether it is framed and branded as Left or Right is, ultimately, noise.

To quickly rehearse Labor's Neoliberalisation of the Australian economy and society: it occured through the putative modernisation of Labourism and its core citizen-subjectivity: the industrial citizen. On the one hand, the transformation of the Australian political economy in the 1980s came about through the floating of the exchange rate, the relaxation of foreign banking restrictions, and the realignment of the Reserve Bank's objectives from reducing unemployment (c1983) to reducing the current account deficit (c 1986--when Keating made his Banana Republic warning) to its current and final focus on finance capital's key requirement: the minimising of inflation. Combined with reducing tariffs and privatising former government-owned enterprises, Labor's 'modernising' of the Australian political economy was accompanied by a reinstatement of the national health insurance scheme in the guise of Medicare, and a series of social-wage contracts--the Accords--which traded wage restraint for social goods, between the Government and the peak trade union body, the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions).

Labor's neoliberal reformation of Australian society, however, was embedded through practices of conducting one's own and other's conduct (the conduct of conduct is Foucault's definition of governmentality). These practices were, and are, saturated with forms of thought: reasoning, concepts, calculations etc. The industrial citizen--labourism's key citzen-subject--protected by arbitration, tariffs, belonging to a trade union, and benefiting from racially exclusive and sexist policies, became reformed as a flexible enterprise, that was open and mobile, efficient and productive, independent and entrepreneurial. Labour--as a category in understanding political economy--was reformed from a fundamental category which could be protected and de-commodified, to one that was subsumed within the category of capital: from labour to human capital. This form of reasoning opened up the category of labour to a foundational reconception whereby work becomes a form of economic conduct which the individual or society can choose to invest in, take risks over, across a portfolio of skills and practices in order to generate an income stream. This Foucauldian understanding of the transformation of labour under Chicago School neoliberalism is nicely summed up in the aphorism: in neoliberalism we become entrepreneurs of ourselves.

It was thus through the re-formation of Labor and labourism that Neoliberalism became embedded as the dominant form of governmentality in Australian political culture. Labor's social-market approach to Neoliberalism--closer to German ordoliberalism than the Chicago School variant--gave the Howard-led coalition a set of social governmentalities against which to define themselves and to remake. The 'Big Picture' directions that Keating sought to move Australian political culture in--a Republic, Reconciliation, and increasing Regional connections with Asia Pacific nations--were framed by Howard as too modernist a path for those Australian traditions and values that had kept Australian society unified and anchored. Thus Rundle argues that

Labor simply took over what should have been the Liberals’ historical role – neoliberal reconstruction – and badged it as a form of modernisation, making it part of a distinctive progressive package, and leaving the Libs with nowhere to go but populism with a use-by date (Rundle, Crikey Newsletter 26.11.09).

So, any mapping of British political culture onto the Australian scene while useful is never neat. Some argue--including Paul Keating, who would say this--that Blair's New Labour, and its third way projects, was a rehearsal of ALP policy in the long Labor decade: 1983-1996. The notion that the British present is our political future needs to be taken with a wary openness. That said, I think it's worth getting some sense of what is being called Red Toryism, as outlines of the projects that are being mooted under David Cameron's leadership of the Tories, start to take shape. As I argued above, there is no necessary pipeline which articulates British Labour's policies--governmentalities--to Australian Labor's, nor one between the Tories and the Australian Coalition.

Having cleared the decks a bit, I will get to an analysis of Red Toryism in a latter post. What, however, has sparked this post was doyen of the boomer cultural left in Australia--Phillip Adams--giving a warm audience to Phillip Blond and his ideas a dew days ago on ABC's Late Night Live. Blond's website is here and he is being talked of as David Cameron's court Philosopher. Adams' response to Blond alarmed me a little as Blond's advocacy of social enterprises sounds a lot like Hayek's notion of catallaxies. I wonder, in particular, what 'social' actually means in this form of neoliberalism?

The second prompt to this post--which was meant to be about Red Toryism--is from a truly excellent analysis of the phenomenon here, which comes via Voyou Desoeuvre. Alex Andrews presents a fantastic analysis of Red Toryism: "Tory Neoliberalism: Why a vote for the Conservative Party is a vote for continuity, not change".

As Alex writes,

it is quite clear what Cameron’s Tories are really offering. There is no change here it is neoliberalism almost all the way down, ‘conservative means’ to ‘progressive ends’ are the same as they have been for thirty years. Cameron is in seamless continuity with Thatcherism and, in fact, New Labour.

Compare this to Rundle's analysis of 'Ruddism' in Overland:

Ruddism is a mode of post-social democratic labour adapted to Australian conditions and history, one that displays no real interest in challenging an atomised neoliberal social order and must therefore explore increasingly specific measures in the management of a population. (10)

Rundle goes on to write that it is Rudd's micromanagerial reshaping of social life which constitutes the essence of Rudd's governmentality: an essence which leaves untouched the "inadequacy of the conventional political frame to humanity's challenges". Getting outside this conventional political frame requires an understanding of Australia's recent past that grasps the extent to which the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian political culture was achieved through the transformation of Labourism. Such an approach to recent Australian political history also requires that the Ghosts of Whitlam are properly mourned and that Neoliberalism is increasingly understood as more than neoclassical economics.

***

Gary Sauer-Thompson has also pointed to Blond's Red Toryism, here. Blond's article from Prospect Feb, 2009 "Rise of the Red Tories" makes for interesting reading. Blond's vision is neoliberal in the sense that there are multiple neoliberalisms that are essentially critiques of the previous version of liberal capitalism, which seek to establish new modes of governmentality because the previous mode governed us too much (This is Foucault's basic insight into liberalism as a mode of government: we are governed too much). Blond's progressive conservatism reads as sharing much with Hayek's liberalism, where civic associations and markets are conflated and seen as the source of liberty and moral values. As Mitchell Dean argues--here--in his discussion of Hayek, this variant of neoliberalism is both radical and conservative. Blond does not admit that capitalism plays any part in the breakdown of social life, which he blames on 1960s left-libertarianism. This is worrying as Blond's governmentality opens the door to a reactionary authoritarian response to the social fragmentation that his concomitant advocacy of greater marketisation of social relations gives rise to.

Indeed, advocating decentralisation of state-enterprises--hospitals etc.--so that local trust funds, local capital can come into ownership and control of the management of these bodies, requires a removal of forms of welfare-state style government, but not forms of government as such. The state will govern differently: it will empower and enable. Such neoliberal rostrums sound excellent, but in reality there is no single act of empowerment to be followed by the enabled local community thereafter exercising its morally edifying, defragmenting, efficient and freedom-enhancing control over the local school, hospital etc. Rather, Blond's project would see an ongoing mode of governing through communities which would be constituted on a continuum with those who are capable of self-management and self-empowerment--at one end--and those that require greater policing, older modes of government--at the other. What, also, is to prevent these public-private bodies from becoming shareholder entities, where majority shareholders determine their directions and activities if not state-based regulation and enforcement?

Red Toryism's rediscovery of the social and society is a rationality that needs to be analysed. What are the objects, aims, methods and ends of this modes of governmentality--this Red Toryism- that seeks to radically alter modes of government in the names of "society", this "civitas", the "local". What, in other words, counts as society, civic and local?

Ruddism: some thoughts

It’s probably derriere garde—in some quarters—to use the language of blog posts and newspapers as metaphors for understanding contemporary government, but I wonder if it’s worth considering that the projects of the current Rudd-Labor Government are actually happening under or over the fold.

Two years into this Government’s tenure and there is a sense that the mainstream media are propagating a continuation of the sorts of commentator culture warrior, ‘balance’ reporting-interviewing practices, that came to dominate the end of the Howard era. Such techniques seemed to have worked effectively in the early to mid noughties, when economic and national security were presented as constantly under threat and the Leader’s ubiquitous radio presence was sought to establish the firm borders between those who were with us and those against. (We still listen to the ABC’s News Radio of a morning in our household, as we did in the Howard era, and one notable difference is the lack of the Leader’s voice on the radio). So, before looking at the so-called substance of the mediatized products of the Rudd Government, I want to consider the forms of the media-government mix

The current Leader is more a creature of television and the new social media: breakfast magazine-style TV, in particular. Rudd is narrowcasting more than Howard, and this has prompted some mainstream political journalists to draw attention to the repetition of Rudd’s sequences of narrowcasts, suggesting that this technique is redolent with spin and micro-managed manipulation.

Rudd is using media differently to Howard, and these different practices have left the broadsheet, TV and radio political journalist elite at a loss. Consider, for example, the weekly ABC TV show The Insiders. This one hour Sunday morning show is a magazine-style program, which comprises about 8 segments. The primary section of the show is an ‘discussion’ chaired by ex-Labor staffer Barry Cassidy, who presides over three TV, radio or print political journalists/ commentators, as they range over what they see as the main political events of the week. This panel is meant to be ‘balanced’—meaning that to the right of the screen is a culture-warrior News Ltd commentator, and to the left a social-liberal Fairfax or Labor-aligned journalist/ commentator resides. This segment is interrupted by a cross to The Senior Political Journalist—Paul Kelly—whose magisterial analysis is handed down in a language of absolute definitiveness that frequently clashes with the shifting ephemera of week-to-week politics.

The panel, the host, the doyen . . . these are truly insiders, but what they are inside increasingly appears to be the new outside. If Rudd is the king of spin, then these in-outsiders are often secondary spinners, offered one to two minutes to interpret the political rhetoric and events of the week in ways that rarely produce any insight into what is going on, under the fold.

Rudd doesn’t appear on The Insiders. He has, however, been appearing on a talk-variety TV show, Rove, which aims at something like the 18-39 demographic. He also appears on ABC TV’s flagship current affairs show, The 7:30 Report. The point is that the mix of media through which politics is both occurring and being reported is shifting, and that the insiders of the political journalism establishment have attempted to explain changes in this mix by drawing on a discourse which personalizes politics through the leader’s style of leadership. There is, of course, nothing new in this focus on the personal techniques of self of the Leader. But such a focus is, I think, bring prompted by a lack of understanding about what is going on under the fold.

So, as the techniques of governing through the media shift, what is going on? Can these changes be reported in the old ways? Maybe not. Maybe such changes need both a new language of abstract analysis and more narrative-based forms of testimony—even collective testimony—to articulate such changes. A mixture of what can be said and told about what is happening on the ground combined with an analysis of how these forms of practices and thought can be explained at the level of larger organizations, of the state, of NGOs and so on.

What was happening on the ground during the Howard-era was to some extent routed through the figure of the ordinary Australian who was defined in the media as someone whose freedom and values were not to be contained or directed by cosmopolitan elites. Such culture war tropes were neatly allied to the figure of the small-business owner, the mom and dad shareholder, and to nebulous family values. Thus a neoliberal-neoconservative amalgam of practices and pressures circulated through the figure of the ordinary Australian: a figure that was posited as being grounded; as living in the 'real world'. The short-circuiting of this amalgam in the Australian context arrived in various events, not least, the Schapelle Corby drug-trials, the Chaser’s APEC stunt and the anti-Workchoices campaigns. These events, among others, tore at the media complicity in these amalgams of the neolib-neocon project. But the tear in media fabric has been replaced by old ideas about social democracy—fed by Rudd himself—and about Labor’s Whitlamite propensity to fiscal largesse and hence self and national destruction. Rudd’s neoliberalism is thus presented as more of the same, but with a social-democratic heart. The mainstream characterization of Rudd as the King of Spin is to some extent, the judgment of journalists whose bearings are set in an earlier period of government: the Hawke-Keating period. Howard did much to persuade people that his Government was a type of permanent opposition, rolling back the cultural arrogance of the Keating era and its allies in the arts, the universities, the Fairfax press and the ABC. Rudd’s talk appears as spin, because it doesn’t rely on the modes of consensus amongst the political-journalist class that Hawke, Keating and Howard’s spin, did. But what is probably happening is that these forms of consensus are being mediated differently. What appears as repetition to an outsider who was once inside, appears as effective rhetoric and policy to those currently inside, or at least to those connected to government in ways that make the appearance of repetition, an irrelevance--background noise.

In short, what is needed, and what may well be circulating but I don’t know of, is a language that joins the social practices of the ground—of the local, the private, the bodily—to those of the region, the state, the corporate . . . In Foucauldian terms, there needs to be a language that can narrate and explain a new continuum of governmentality.

Now, maybe such a continuum is not a cause for celebration or affirmation, but rather invites and requires critique. Fine. But there is a preliminary need to more accurately narrate and analyse the current continuum. Which brings me, finally, to some suggestive fragments embedded in a recent Guy Rundle essay, “The End of the Whitlamists” in Arena Magazine (no. 102). Rundle’s topic is the residual Whitlamism that has affected the way that some on the Left view the prospects for cultural and social reform that the Rudd Government offers. I have previously analysed Whitlamism as a spectre that haunts the Australian Left, and have argued that its ghostly-ness is evidence of a loss to be worked through. Rundle is taking a similar tack, effectively arguing that one critical component of Whitlamism is that it lingers as a form of melancholy for sections of the Left intelligentsia, especially sections working in the arts and cultural industries.

Rundle has some sharp and, I would say, Foucauldian points to make about the forms of governmentality emerging in the Rudd-era. (He hints that this line of analysis will be expanded on in an upcoming essay in Overland.) So, to the quotes:

‘New Labour’ style regimes mark the end of one type of alliance between organized labour—or the suburban mainstream as it has now become—and an avant-garde intelligentsia, a model going back in explicit form to the 60s, and with its roots in the 19th century. Yet the artistic intelligentsia cannot successfully reflect on its own presuppositions—its rebelliousness hardened into orthodoxy—to mount a sufficiently new critical position on ‘Ruddism’ One can see this, for example, in the somewhat disappointing contribution of centre-left magazine The Monthly to publish contributions with a degree of critical or theoretical depth (some essays by Anne Manne aside) because its implicit ‘Whitlamist’ attitude to Labor, state and culture, lacks a framework with which to analyse the distinctive—and far from emancipatory—approach of the Rudd government to social and cultural life.

One can see this as a renewed push for an explicitly social democratic intellectual movement from a number of left and centre-left writers and activists, one which wears its acceptance of limits as a badge of pride, a sort of reverse radicalism, Yet such moves are occupying a space that has already been carved out by the Rudd-ALP—it is an intellectual movement drawing its legitimacy from a political process, rather than leading it through the application of a critical imagination. That secondary status shunts such people into the position of supply strategies of cultural management to a ruling party—hence a new-found focus on the nature of a progressive patriotism, and a search for ways to manufacture ‘belonging’.

For many the forces of darkness [the neoconservative reaction of the Rudd Government to media-based moral panics, which see Rudd condemn certain figures and which put pressure on censorship regimes: e.g. the Bill Henson affair] are attacks on the big freedoms, which are rarely seriously attacked, while increasing regimes of subjective re-shaping and microregulation of social desires go increasingly unchallenged, because they are wrapped up in various guises (preventative health measures appear to be the most recent) that maintain the old image of social improvement. Only when such processes swing round to take in the artistic community—and that is the Henson case in essence—do such people become aware of the profound transformations of state-society relations taking place.

The avant-garde intelligentsia, by and large, haven’t understood that [there could be different ideas of progress].

Neoliberalism: the conduct of economic conduct

Governmentality

For Foucault, the “encounter between the technologies of domination of others [power] and those of the self I call “governmentality”” (225). Drawing on a sixteenth-century Western European discourse of ‘government’ Foucault seeks to reactivate these older meanings of the term so as to break up the fusion that government and state have in current discourse (2001: 341). These older meanings of government

designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed—the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It covered not only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would therefore be sought not on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary contracts (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power) but, rather, in the area of that singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. (341)

Thus for Foucault the state is not synonymous with government so much as subjected to

the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on. Thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. (Foucault, 2001: 221)

Wendy Brown observes that “as is often the case with Foucault’s ideas [. . .] the notion of governmentality is both extremely theoretically fecund and woefully underspecified” and it is from the scholars of governmentality that much of the fleshing out and application of Foucault’s fecund concept has emerged (Brown, 2005: 142). Indeed, Thomas Lemke’s work on governmentality provides the conceptual basis for thinking it as a continuum of rationalities and techniques which stretches from the self to the state:

While many forms of contemporary critique still rely on the dualism of freedom and constraint, consensus and violence, from the perspective of governmentality the polarity of subjectivity and power ceases to be plausible: government refers to a continuum, which extends from political government right through to forms of self-regulation – namely, “technologies of the self.” (Lemke, 2002: 59)[i]

By taking governmentality as a continuum on which self and state both range, a re-conceptualisation is enabled for the reversible New Left and second wave Feminist tenet: the personal is the political and the political is the personal. Yet such a re-conceptualisation must itself be historicised if we are to move beyond the period of the heyday of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s when Neoliberal forms of governmentality began to emerge and be codified by Chicago University figures like Gary Becker. For Foucault

the interest of [Becker’s] theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic. (The Birth of Biopolitics: 219)

Foucault's argument is that in these theories of human capital the proper theoretical consideration that capital and land have been given in economic theory has yet to be applied to labour. While for Marx it is capitalism that produces abstract labour, for Neoliberals like Becker the category of abstract labour is a false one that results from the limitations of classical economic theory and its concerns with mechanisms and processes of production and of exchange (221-22). Rather than see the self as the seller of labour, Neoliberals see the self as “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself“ (226).

The enterprising and entrepreneurial self is a fixture of everyday life now. But where does Libertarianism fit into these practices of American Neoliberalism? If Neoliberalism is, in part, a textual practice then how does it happen in text, in specifically local ways, in Australia? In order to explore these questions I will look below at Left-libertarian writer Moorhouse's shifting positions on governmentality around the time of the breakdown of the post-war boom and the financial system that had enabled it. What is of particular interest is how a Left-Libertarian practises literary politics before, during and after a shift in their own conception of governmentality and before, during and after what is arguably the emergence and dominance of the Neoliberal modes of governmentality. Lohrey’s Left-Labourist literary trajectory passes through the long Labor decade and hence Neoliberal governmentality at a later point. Yet, her initial orientation propels her focus away from technologies of the state towards those of the self. This is a curious cross-trajectory. Why would ostensibly Left novelists respond to the same phenomena in inverted ways? Before addressing this question I will move into a mid-range reading of Moorhouse and Lohrey's oeuvres.

---

[i] Barry Hindess also refers to governmentality as a continuum:

Foucault maintains that [. . .] there is a certain continuity between the government of oneself, the government of a household and the government of a state or community. Linked to this continuity, he argues, is the fact that the principles of political action and those of personal conduct can be seen as being intimately related. He suggests, for example, that successful government of others depends, in the first instance, on the capacity of those doing the governing to govern themselves. As for the governed, to the extent that it avoids the extremes of domination, their government must aim to affect their conduct—that is, it must operate through their capacity to regulate their own behaviour. In this respect too, successful government of others is often thought to depend on the ability of those others to govern themselves, and it must therefore aim to secure the conditions under which they are enabled to do so. (1996: 105)

On Governmentality

In Foucault's late work, the notion of government is elaborated within a kind of typology of forms of power that seeks to displace the immediate identification of power with domination. Government comes to be viewed as a kind of intermediate region which is not purely one of either freedom or domination, either consent or coercion. It is located between a primary type of power as an open, strategic and reversible set of relations between liberties, and domination as the fixing and blocking of these relations into permanent and hierarchical distributions. Government is between these two in that it involves a form of power over others that is made operable through the liberties of those over whom it is exercised.

Mitchell Dean Governmentality 1999: 46-7

Rudd's post-Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism can become dominant as governmentality without being dominant as ideology -- the former refers to governing practices and the latter to a popular order of belief that may or may not be fully in line with the former, and that may even be a site of resistance to it.

Wendy Brown "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy" Edgework: 49

The retreat of the state which is supposed to constitute neoliberalism in fact corresponds to an extension of government.

Jacques Donzelot interview with C. Gordon. Foucault Studies 5. Jan 2008: 53.

Ideology -
a society's unconscious tailoring of criteria of objectivity to fit its own interests.

Paul Hamilton, Historicism:4.

_________________

Neoliberalism is a political project which treats citizens as consumers and entrepreneurs, and treats democratic politics as best pursued through market relationships. The rhetoric, or ideology, of Neoliberalism, rather than its full implementation, is what is now rightly in retreat. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's essay in the social-liberal magazine The Monthly is a political intervention: concerned with the language of politics and the orthodox ways of thinking about the relationship between states and markets. In other words, it is ideology, rather than governmentality, that is being contested by Rudd in his essay. The heat and noise in the op-ed pages of the Australian is about ideology, and what is fascinating is to watch the rhetoricians of Neoliberalism at News Ltd admit that, of course, government plays a role in regulating markets, and that the danger is governing too much, not government as such.

There is a sense that we are now living through just such a time: barely a decade into the new millennium, barely 20 years since the end of the Cold War and barely 30 years since the triumph of neo-liberalism - that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time.

The agent for this change is what we now call the global financial crisis. In the space of just 18 months, this crisis has become one of the greatest assaults on global economic stability to have occurred in three-quarters of a century. As others have written, it "reflects the greatest regulatory failure in modern history". It is not simply a crisis facing the world's largest private financial institutions - systemically serious as that is in its own right. It is more than a crisis in credit markets, debt markets, derivatives markets, property markets and equity markets - notwithstanding the importance of each of these.
Kevin Rudd

Since the early 1970s Chicago School liberalism -- a.k.a Neoliberalism -- has been ascendant and has been presented in terms of Government (state authoritarianism) versus markets (civil libertarianism). The mantra was get government out of our lives so we can be free and prosper. The reality during the past 35 years was that states acted in concert with forms of markets that redistributed risk down the social scale, and made life more precarious for millions of people. The state never retreated from governing (as Foucault puts it - conducting conduct) over the last 35 years, but, as many neoliberal commentators are now admitting, states governed in the interests of finance capital. Rudd's anti-neoliberal rhetoric is the antidote to the pro-neoliberal rhetoric of the past 35 years and needs to be seen within the basic terms of liberalism which opposes markets to states: always a false opposition. Arguing for a greater role for the state, as Rudd does, is code for redistributing risk more evenly across social strata, and hopefully, between generations.

Here are some links to previous posts on this blog which attempt to expand on and explain what s meant by Neoliberalism as governmentality. Here, here, here and here.

Dregulation

Peter Gowan's essay in the latest New Left Review -- Crisis in the Heartland: consequences of the New Wall Street System -- is an interesting read not least for the clear way in which he lays out some of the more complex elements in those credit market operations that have been at the heart of the GFC (Global Financial Crisis).
I found the following passage (below), especially the argument proferred in the second paragraph, nailed the false binary opposition between regulation and deregulation. Neo-liberalism, however, is not just an ideology --here used in the sense of an imaginary or false set of ideas that mystify and cause people to act against our own better interests -- but can also be seen as rationalities and techniques for conducting conduct: governmentality. Where Gowan writes:

The problem with this explanation is that, while the New Wall Street System was legitimated by free-market, laissez-faire or neo-liberal outlooks, these do not seem to have been operative ideologies for its practitioners, whether in Wall
Street or in Washington.

Wendy Brown argues, instead, that this contradiction between practice and belief/ rhetoric is consistent with Neoliberalism as governmentality:

Neoliberalism can become the dominant governmentality without being dominant as ideology -- the former refers to governing practices and the latter to a popular order of belief that may or may not be fully in line with the former, and that may even be a site of resistance to it. ("Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal
Democracy" Edgework: 49)

*

Prevailing theories

Much of the mainstream debate on the causes of the crisis takes the form of an ‘accidents’ theory, explaining the debâcle as the result of contingent actions by, say, Greenspan’s Federal Reserve, the banks, the regulators or the rating agencies. We have argued against this, proposing rather that a relatively coherent structure which we have called the New Wall Street System should be understood as having generated the crisis. But in addition to the argument above, we should note another striking feature of the last twenty years: the extraordinary harmony between Wall Street operators and Washington regulators. Typically in American history there have been phases of great tension, not only between Wall Street and Congress but also between Wall Street and the executive branch. This was true, for example, in much of the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet there has been a clear convergence over the last quarter of a century, the sign of a rather well-integrated project. [30]

An alternative explanation, much favoured in social-democratic circles, argues that both Wall Street and Washington were gripped by a false ‘neo-liberal’ or ‘free-market’ ideology, which led them astray. An ingenious right-wing twist on this suggests that the problematic ideology was ‘laissez-faire’—that is, no regulation—while what is needed is ‘free-market thinking’, which implies some regulation. The consequence of either version is usually a rather rudderless discussion of ‘how much’ and ‘what kind’ of regulation would set matters straight. [31] The problem with this explanation is that, while the New Wall Street System was legitimated by free-market, laissez-faire or neo-liberal outlooks, these do not seem to have been operative ideologies for its practitioners, whether in Wall Street or in Washington. Philip Augar’s detailed study of the Wall Street investment banks, The Greed Merchants, cited above, argues that they have actually operated in large part as a conscious cartel—the opposite of a free market. It is evident that neither Greenspan nor the bank chiefs believed in the serious version of this creed: neo-classical financial economics. Greenspan has not argued that financial markets are efficient or transparent; he has fully accepted that they can tend towards bubbles and blow-outs. He and his colleagues have been well aware of the risk of serious financial crisis, in which the American state would have to throw huge amounts of tax-payers’ money into saving the system. They also grasped that all the various risk models used by the Wall Street banks were flawed, and were bound to be, since they presupposed a general context of financial market stability, within which one bank, in one market sector, might face a sudden threat; their solutions were in essence about diversification of risk across markets. The models therefore assumed away the systemic threat that Greenspan and others were well aware of: namely, a sudden negative turn across all markets. [32]

Greenspan’s two main claims were rather different. The first was that, between blow-outs, the best way for the financial sector to make large amounts of money is to sweep away restrictions on what private actors get up to; a heavily regulated sector will make far less. This claim is surely true. His second claim has been that, when bubbles burst and blow-outs occur, the banks, strongly aided by the actions of the state authorities, can cope with the consequences. As William White of the bis has pointed out, this was also an article of faith for Bernanke. [33]

iii. systemic options
The real debate over the organization of financial systems in capitalist economies is not about methods and modes of regulation. It is a debate between systemic options, at two levels.

A public-utility credit and banking system, geared to capital accumulation in the productive sector versus a capitalist credit and banking system, subordinating all other economic activities to its own profit drives.
An international financial and monetary system under national-multilateral co-operative control versus a system of imperial character, dominated by the Atlantic banks and states working in tandem.

Vertigo: oscillations of emergence

***Spoiler Alert: below is a review of this novella which discusses aspects of the plot***

Lohrey’s fifth major fictional work is, unusually for this novelist, of novella-length. In her previous four novels Lohrey turned her acute vision to fictional critiques and portrayals of the political and ethical lives of contemporary Australians, making use of the longer novel form to build size into an aspect of the narrative: the minutae of renovating and interior home design in The Reading Group (1988); the techniques of macrobiotic food preparation in Camille’s Bread (1995); the complex informal social and political network of 1950s Labor politics in The Morality of Gentlemen (1984); and the fine sifting of questions of timing a pregnancy in The Philosopher’s Doll (2004). Starting from a focus on a more publicly and male-based form of political content in her earlier novels, which are treated to astringent Brechtian alienation techniques, Lohrey shifted to a concern with more domestic and intimate forms of politics, de-intensifying the acidic effects of Brechtian presentation which were replaced by a more allusive, dream-like layering of narrating levels and tones. This shift is most notable between 1988’s The Reading Group – an elegy for an ensemble of the cultural Left in Australia who in the post-Whitlam interregnum are no longer able to read the politics of the time: the old body politic has passed, the new is yet to be born – and 1995’s Camille’s Bread – in which a triadic ‘family’ negotiate the politics of the body and the formation of new techniques of self. Indeed, Lohrey’s fictional trajectory can be said to begin with Left critiques of (political) Labourism moving into narratives heavy with (physical) labourism: from works of mourning into works of emergence.

Vertigo as both a shorter novel and coming after a novel concerned with the timing of a young professional couple’s reproduction would seem to offer no way of furthering the direction of this trajectory, for what comes after a novel about birth?

First things first. Lohrey’s voice is a distinctive one and in Vertigo the distancing tone – that in her earlier novels was at times harshly misanthropic – and sly humour are still present though there is an affection for her central characters and the community life they find after leaving Sydney, arriving in a small fictitious NSW Southern Coast town, that is increased after the rather cold portrayal of the couple in The Philosopher’s Doll. The constant narratorial distance present throughout much of the novella is, as its mysteries are revealed, seen as a technique to delay the re-connection of the central characters into their mournful emotional lives after the devastation of a miscarriage.

Vertigo is, like The Reading Group, elegiaic in tone. Unlike her post-Whitlam political work of mourning, Vertigo resolves its loss through a cathartic bushfire that opens the central couple up to working-through the pain brought by the loss of their boy, who appears throughout the novel as a ghostly child. Vertigo is a pastoral narrative that ascribes a spiritual force to the land that these young sea-changing escapees of Sydney experience as a terrifying power and as a cathartic spur to mourn a loss, enabling them to find a redemptive hope by the end of the story.

The novella is dramatically structured by the bushfire and by the effects that its aftermath has on the grief of the central couple. If there is a stunted emotional life drawn for the couple then the break-though into grief-saturated feeling near the story’s end is clearly meant to have been built toward through the more distancing narratorial tone prior to that moment. This technique of shiftnig the tone was unsuccessful on first reading as it seemed too transparently designed to promote a readerly catharthis as feeling rushes back into the narrative via the narrator closing the distance from which the lives of the central characters are presented. I actually think that this novel is profoundly conservative as it aligns reproduction with nature-land. If what the couple do in their new village is of any political consequence then we are not given any presentation of this form of politics. Surely if Lohrey’s interest in the demographics of sea-changers and tree-changers in terms of how these new forces are producing new social forms, or even hybrid social forms, then the focus on the emotional life of a grieving couple and their encounter with the redemptive power of the Bush is to present a portrait of politics that is Romantic and subject to the vitalist powers of nature. There seems to be a complete lack of what sort of social forms such stories of migration might presage or be emblematic of, except that there is the beginnings of such a paradigm shift. Lohrey has become a writer of new beginnings. The disappointment is that these conditions for new or even hybrid techniques of self are only ever part of the continuum of governmentality: techniques of self are connected to techniques of state. No one can escape the public world and a condition of the freedom to have nature cleanse and purge grief – as occurs in Vertigo – is that practices and rationalities of government extend from the preparation of a property for bushfire, the care of blackbirds and magpies to the Land Planning acts and local council regulations that fundamentally affect the Bush that is so capable of producing epiphanies and metamorphosis. In increasing her novelistic focus on emergence and re-birth Lohrey’s earlier concern with the techniques of state – the other end of the continuum of governmentality – has fallen away.

In one sense a corrective to the lack of narrativising those public-political concerns of her earlier novels in her more recent ones has been Lohrey’s non-fiction essays. Her Quarterly Essay on the emergence of the Greens in Tasmania, when placed alongside Vertigo, does indeed plug some of the gaps that the novel leaves. The poor reception of The Reading Group, which in lacking conventional narrative closure seemed to strike some reader-reviewers as thereby unsuccessfully incomplete, might explain why Lohrey abandoned the acrid Brechtian presentation of what is her most accomplished and richest novel: to have a readership.


Yet Vertigo, like The Philosopher’s Doll, lacks the warmth that dropping the Brechtian mode could allow more room to radiate. The slewing off of the negating and critical orientation in her earlier novels seems to have been exchanged for a slow diminution of a broader conception of politics in her fiction. Where in The Reading Group the loss of Social-Liberal-Labourist governmentalities is presented as a tear in the continuum of practices of self and state, in her more recent novels, techniques of self have come to dominate the narratives. The implicit project of The Reading Group -- to begin the work of mourning so as to repair and re-form a new continuum -- seems to have been placed aside and each new novel or novella has become a repetition of a scene of emergence that is never developed, or drawn into practices and rationalities of state that hover in the background, unsaid, invisible and off-stage. Where in The Reading Group these rationalities and techniques were front of stage -- the novel's bushfires symbolizing a permanent crisis of state security -- in Vertigo the bushfires are symbols of nature's sublime power to re-birth and heal, albeit a spiritually local and Australian nature. It seems jarring then that apart from the naming of the fictitious town there is little Aboriginal presence in the novel. In Vertigo nature's sublime power is specifically local, Australian and has had its indigenous history abjected.

Vertigo hints at a new forms of governmentality, but Lohrey has been hinting at emerging forms since 1995. Hopefully her next long-form work of fiction sees her return to the poetics of politics that The Reading Group dropped its readers into. If there are ways out of Neoliberalism then narratives of beginnings and emergences while good starts need to be developed. The tear in the continuum of governmentality presented so forcefully in The Reading Group is yet to be sutured. I hope her next work attends to such work as we need her voice in these times.

Governmentality - Thomas Friedman

Friedman, that's Thomas not Milton, today in the New York Times was citing from a book he'd returned to recently to help him explain how the US will work through the current crises in the 'unreal' economy. Strikes me that this following passage is what Foucault meant by governmentality: techniques and rationalities by way of which the self, the household, the state are conducted.

Yes, this bubble is about us — not all of us, many Americans were way too poor to play. But it is about enough of us to say it is about America. And we will not get out of this without going back to some basics, which is why I find myself re-reading a valuable book that I wrote about once before, called, “How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life).” Its author, Dov Seidman, is the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical corporate cultures.

Seidman basically argues that in our hyperconnected and transparent world, how you do things matters more than ever, because so many more people can now see how you do things, be affected by how you do things and tell others how you do things on the Internet anytime, for no cost and without restraint.

“In a connected world,” Seidman said to me, “countries, governments and companies also have character, and their character — how they do what they do, how they keep promises, how they make decisions, how things really happen inside, how they connect and collaborate, how they engender trust, how they relate to their customers, to the environment and to the communities in which they operate — is now their fate.”

We got away from these hows. We became more connected than ever in recent years, but the connections were actually very loose. That is, we went away from a world in which, if you wanted a mortgage to buy a home, you needed to show real income and a credit record into a world where a banker could sell you a mortgage and make gobs of money upfront and then offload your mortgage to a bundler who put a whole bunch together, chopped them into bonds and sold some to banks as far afield as Iceland.

The bank writing the mortgage got away from how because it was just passing you along to a bundler. And the investment bank bundling these mortgages got away from how because it didn’t know you, but it knew it was lucrative to bundle your mortgage with others. And the credit-rating agency got away from “how” because there was just so much money to be made in giving good ratings to these bonds, why delve too deeply? And the bank in Iceland got away from how because, hey, everyone else was buying the stuff and returns were great — so why not?

Of course, Friedman, in quoting Seidman, is not saying anything out of the ordinary- ethics is an old subject. But what the highlighted passage does show, I think, is that the reasons or rationalities for practices are, to turn Seidman's logic around, what saturates the practices, and that these techniques of conducting conduct are practiced across a continuum of bodies: countries, governments, corporations and selves. So, rather than the ideology of deregulation or of the creative innovations of free markets, or the rhetoric of completely new markets that will never fall to earth, Friedman is drawing attention to techniques. And it's to this level that the regulation-deregulation debate needs to shift. Not whether or not to have regulation, because as should be clear there were regulations governing, for example, sub-prime mortgages, but the how of regulations - governmentalities.

Reg-u-later: Liberal Governmentalities

Having been immersed in Foucauldian-based Governmentality writings on neoliberalism of late I've been tempted to contribute to some blog threads where the talk is over the Wall St crisis and one line of debate is structured around the bring-back-regulation vs the we-are-already-overregulated polemics. One comment I endorse is here:

Tom N. said:
ANOTHER BORING STOUSH BETWEEN STRAW ECONOMIC MEN

Reading the soft-left media and blogs over recent weeks, together with retorts along the lines of Rafe’s post*, has reminded me of the barrenness of the “free-market vs government” debate. It seems that, for a number of people in the former group, the US meltdown is conclusive evidence of the failure of free markets, and all those economists who believe in markets free from government intervention - an empty set, but never mind - need to learn the lesson and repent. This line of argument has reminded me of Michael Pussey’s [sic] misrepresentations of “nasty narrow-indeed New Right neoclassical economic rationalists” a decade or so back. KRudd’s recent revelation that there is a role for government intervention, not just market forces, is another example of the false characterisation of the practice of economics.

In reality, day-to-day economic policy advising is - as it has long been - about optimum levels and the design of regulation; not whether or not there should be any. Similarly, no economist I know thinks that the appropriate place of the free market is anywhere other that in the textbook, as a useful device for thinking about some matters, but not as something that should, or could, exist in practice in a modern society.

Of course, discussion of the nuts and bolts of good regulation and policy is unlikely to keep the interest of many readers, so one can understand the attractiveness of “government vs market” type grand narratives. I just wish commentators would label this stuff “fiction”. Perhaps its another case for appropriate regulation.

Late-Foucault scholar, and yes there is a late-late Foucault emerging as the English transationas of his College de France Lectures are still coming, Thomas Lemke writes:

The concept of governmentality . . . proves useful in correcting the diagnosis of neo-liberalism as an expansion of economy in politics, that takes for granted the separation of state and market. The argument goes that there is some "pure" or "anarchic" economy that will be "regulated" or "civilised" by a political reaction of society. But as we know since Marx there is no market independent of the state, and the economy is always a political economy.

Foucault's discussion of neo-liberal governmentality shows that the so-called "retreat of the state" is in fact a prolongation of government, neo-liberalism is not the end but a transformation of politics, that restructures the power relations in society. What we observe is not a diminishment or a reduction of state sovereignty and planning capacities but a displacement from formal to informal techniques of government and the appearance of new actors on the scene of government (e.g. NGOs), that indicate fundamental transformations in statehood and a new relation between state and civil actors.

From "Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique"


Calls for a return to regulation miss the opportunity to have a debate about the how, who, what and aims of techniques of government (the conduct of conduct). There's an interesting post at Mark Davis' blog where he articulates the disappointing recommendations on the carbon emissions reduction scheme to regulation in the financial markets and the sense that the Neoliberal era might be over and that a new paradigm is needed. As Lemke's quotes above seek to make clear, the separation of economy and state, whether the economy is rule-of-the-jungle anarchic or a beautiful self-regulating machine conducted by the invisible hand, is a form of liberal rationality and provides the basis on which practices of government forms its problems in need of solution.

Foucault talks instead of the state as subject to governmentalisation. This is certainly evident in the embedding of market rationalities (forms of knowledge and reasoning, vocabularies) into apparatuses of the state over the last 35 years: managerial & enterpreneurial regimes, flexible, competitive and efficient teams. While one understanding of these changes is that they evidence the abandonment of the state to the market, the expansion of the state contradicts what amounts to the ideological rhetoric that masks the practices of a Neoliberal governmentalisation of the state. Rather than the economy overpowering the state Neoliberalism amounts to political techniques of conducting behaviour that are based on market practices and reasoning, against a desired for horizon of market-enabled plenitude.

While I don't think we can go back to Keynesian practices of government, and clearly neoliberal modes have proven to be atopic (like atopic illnesses - asthma and eczema - where the symptoms of the disease are temporally deferred and physically displaced) in that they generate power through payouts and interest from finance capital for an elite who are immunised from the toxic waste that their wealth abjected, my feeling is that we should be looking to a combination of rhythms of governmentalities: a healthy harmony of governmental rhythms or eurhythmia of government. The danger is that there will be a call, fearful and even religious, for an isorhythmia.

America is Waiting . . . [David Byrne and Brian Eno]

Liberalism as political rationality of government: too much state governing, not enough self-governing

A useful passage from Barry Hindess on Liberalism:

What particularly distinguishes liberalism, as Foucault describes it, from earlier versions of the art of government is not the view, which is also shared by the science of police, that nonstate agencies play an important part in the life of the population. Rather it is, first, the concern that the state may be "governing too much," that there may be cases in which "it is needless or harmful for [the state] to intervene." . . . Second . . . is liberalism's more restricted usage of the term government, which is now confined to the work of the state and certain of its agencies. This liberal usage involves a major redefinition of the term: where government was once seen as a ubiquitous work of regulation performed by a multiplicity of agencies throughout the population, it now comes to be identified more narrowly with the work of the state and its agencies. Government is no longer regarded as a field of activity that constitutes and maintains the social order from within, but rather as acting on this order from without. "The happiness of society" remains its fundamental concern, as it was in the era of police, but since government is now identified with the activities of state, it is no longer seen as something that is necessarily best served by the actions of government itself.

[“Politics as Government: Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Political Reason.” Alternatives 30 (2005): 389-413.394]

This is useful precisely because it unsettles the ideology of liberalism which counterposes a realm of individual and civic freedom (fundamentally modelled on and legitimated by market operations, like contract) to state regulation and authority. Foucualt's concepts of government and governmentality unearth the genealogy of this liberal critique of government - governing too much - and place it into the forcefield of debates about the government of the self and the state, and the roles and limits of 'police'. Thus one of Liberalism's key techniques is to conflate state and government and use this conflation to practice a form of distancing from this form of government as a practice of freedom from government as such. But such a distancing relies on other forms of regulation to do the work of governing; other forms of governmentality not necessarily emanating from the state. These other forms presume and work with dominations and disciplines, positive and negative, that community-governance, self-governance, household 'codes of conduct' seek to better manage. Management of the self, through what Foucault calls techniques of self, is thus a fundamental set of tasks and constant goal of governmentality: tasks and goals that are conducted through the formative techniques of the education system and other arms of the state and are daily mediated by work, media technology, narratives, religion, and so on. One domain of governmentality is that set of techniques whereby the self comes of age: how the self forms as responsible adult; the description of the tasks and practices that adult formation must accept as the work of a mature-ing self, and must accommodate as 'real'.

How these tasks and these paths of formation are narrativised in fictional and non-fictional print genres during the so-called modernisation of the Australian Economy in the 1980s-1990s is what my research investigates: a National coming-of-age in which maturity is tied in political and media narratives to financial deregulation, labour market reform, the installation of managerial regimes in public administration, and the privatisation of state-owned instruments and corporations. Concomitant with these 're-forms' was a pressure to reform the self: Australians needed to become more open, competitive, efficient, productive, flexible, 'creative'. Technologies of the self promoted through a pedagogic political discourse spoken most persausively by Treasurer then Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Now that Australia is headed toward a concerted policy response to Global Warming and an Emissions Trading System (ETS) is being debated, in spite of the neoliberal uses to which Keating put his substantial rhetorical skills, I'm nostalgic for the clarity and persuasiveness of his tongue: where in the current government is anybody capable of simplifying the rationale and prospects for an ETS? Which would be, paradoxically, a market-based system once the state sets up its first-period ground rules and prices. Is an ETS too much of a problem for the liberal critique of government and too much of a problem for the Keynesian-based notion of re-regulation that so often comes as its counter-critique? Do we need another Foucauldian notion of governmentality - the governing of the ecosphere perhaps - that can operate as a well-spring for positive techniques and practises which cut across selves, households, corporations, community group, local municipal councils, state and federal government?

Notes. Barry Hindess on Governmentalities

Some notes from
Barry Hindess. Discourses of power: from Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Foucault maintains that . . . there is a certain continuity between the government of oneself, the government of a household [oeconomy] and the government of a state or community. Linked to this continuity, he argues, is the fact that the principles of political action and those of personal conduct can be seen as being intimately related. He suggests, for example, that successful government of others depends, in the first instance, on the capacity of those doing the governing to govern themselves. As for the governed, to the extent that it avoids the extremes of domination, their government must aim to affect their conduct - that is, it must operate through their capacity to regulate their own behaviour. In this respect too, successful government of others is often thought to depend on the ability of those others to govern themselves, and it must therefore aim to secure the conditions under which they are enabled to do so. [105]

[W]hat matters in the study of governmental power [from the perspective of government as the regulation of conduct] is not so much the state itself, considered as a more or less unified set of instrumentalities, but rather the broader strategies of government within which the instrumentalities of the state are incorporated and deployed. [109]

For Hindess there is also another more specific and precise form of Foucault's use of the term government: "'the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a whole.'" [Foucault cite. 109]

Government, in this specific sense, is not to be confused with the rule of the prince, feudal magnate or emperor, or even with the collective rule over themselves that is often said to have been excercised by citizens of the independent Greek communities and of the Roman republic. [109]

The government is based on intrinsic rational principles- reason of state - and has as its main object population. Population has 'its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity, etc' [and it emerged due to an understanding of it] as characterized by its own aggregate phenomena, irreducible to those of the families contained within it. [Foucault cite. 111]

Population "comes to appear as above all else as the ultimate end of government. In constrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain those ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population. [Foucault cite. 111-2]

3 'approaches to the general problem of government: discipline, pastoral power, liberalism.' [112]

3 rationalities of government.

1. Discipline
'A productive power par excellence: it aims not only to constrain those over whom it is exercised, but also to enhance and make use of their capacities.'
[113]

The idea that the conduct of others (and of oneself) can be subjected to instrumental control is clearly predicated on an orientation which Heidegger describes as 'the essence of technology'. This orientation treats the world as consisting essentially of forces that can be harnessed, at least in principle, to human purposes. Human individuals and human aggregates, too, will thus be seen, like all other phenomena, as if they were a standing reserve of energy to be put to use. But before this can happen, what it is that will be used in this way - what Heidegger refers to as 'a calculable coherence of forces' - must first be defined and identified. For this reason, Foucault insists that the expansion of discipline in this period goes hand-in-hand with the invention of the humanist subject; that is, of the conception of the human individual as endowned with a soul, consciousness, guilt, remorse, and other features of an interiority that can be worked on by other agents. This humanist subject came to be seen as the locus of usable energy and, therefore, as the focus of instrumental control: the focus, in other words, of discipline. [115]

Such discipline requires techniques of knowledge about and concerning the human subject. Thus discipline is knowledge/power. Techniques of disciplinary power include: surveillance, regimentation, classification. [118]

2. Pastoral Power (Shepherd-flock game): police, confession, guidance and self-examination

a more continuous and more intimate form of government than consensual ones: "to promote the well-being of its [a government's] subjects by means of detailed and comprehensive regulation of their behaviour. [. . . ] Pastoral power . . . is concerned more with the welfare of its subjects than with their liberty." [118]

Three facets of pastoral power: i. "Shepherd governs a flock and each of its member, rather than a territory and each of its inhabitants. [ . . . ii] the flock exists in and through the activity of the shepherd: remove the shepherd and the flock is likely to collapse into a mass of dispersed individuals. [ . . . iii] the shepherd cares for the flock both individually and collectively, attending to the needs of its members." [119]

Hindess summarizes Foucault's reach into older meanings of 'police': It referred both to an area of government administration - covering everything apart from justice, finance, the army and diplomacy - and to the objectives of that administration. In effect, police was responsible for the comprehensive regulation of social life in the interests and development of society and the improvement of individuals, and it was expected to pursue these objectives in the most rational fashion . . ."a good national 'police' was not to be achieved solely by politicians or by a professional corp of 'police', but by publicly concerned, philanthropically minded citizens." [Andrews cite. 120-121]

"The theory of police exemplifies the comprehensive responsibility for the welfare of the flock and each of its members that is central to Foucault's account of the 'pastoral' rationality of government." [121]

The early [Christian] church developed models of pastoral power which were later adapted by 17c 'Confessional' states in Europe.

"[T]he 'pastoral' ise of confession, self-examination and guidance continue to be found today, not only in Christian churches and sects, but also in the work of a variety of specialized state agencies and private charitable and philanthropic organizations, in may kinds of counselling, therapy and techniques of personality modification . . . In such cases, the training of individuals in the exercise of self-government serves as an instrument of the government of their conduct. . . . [T]he 'pastoral' use of confession, self-exmaination and guidance of conduct should be seen as instruments of government that work in part through the formation of individuals who can normally be relied upon to impose an appropriate rule on their own behaviour.[122-3]

3. Liberty and the Liberal Rationality of Government

From one, orthodox, perspective "[t]he fundamental problem of liberal government . . . is to build the appropriate restraints into a system of government that nevertheless remains sufficiently powerful to secure the liberty of its subjects." [124]

Foucault's very different perspective on Liberal rationality begins from his tenets that wherever power is freedom (to some extent) is always already there, and that governmental power works through the behaviour [conduct] of free persons. For Foucault the fundamental rationality of Liberal government is that it should promote the freedom of its subjects rather than see such freedoms as threats to its governing. Thus Liberal government seeks to secure what it considers as natural conditions for the generation of this freedom; security of markets-economy, population growth. At the heart of liberalism, in this view, is an interventionist state. [124-5]

Two Liberal critiques of police:
I. "the comprehensiveness of police attempts at regulation - the fact that they are aimed at the entire population - must be rejected on the grounds that the primary objective of the state should be the defence of individual liberty not the pursuit of happiness." [126]

II. Foucault's analysis of liberal critique of police focuses through something similar to Adam Smith's critique in which police=regulation=dependency=conditions for degeneration. cf "nanny state" critiques in which welfare is seen to blunt self-reliance, independence and moral improvement. Here the market comes shining through as that self-regulating and 'natural' realm, or sphere, in which these attributes can best be generated in a condition which is 'state-free'.

So, "[i]n Foucault's terms, then, the liberal rationality of government regards the liberty of its subjects as an indispensable element of government itself." [129]

Governing through a freedom that is regulated indirectly: through the formation of selves that is the aim of education. Or the formation of selves that occurs through enculturation, or what in German is called Bildung: often the first term in the literary genre class the Bildungsroman, or the formation or coming-of-age novel.

One research problem in my thesis is this: if neo-liberalism, a newer form of governmental rationality best summed up in the texts of the Chicago School political-economic intellectual Milton Friedman, becomes ascendant over the long Labor decade then how does its regulation through formation of selves appear in Australian literary fiction and in Australian Labor party discourse? In other words, is there an Australian inflection to the Bildungs of neoliberalism? Some previous thoughts here.

The (welfare) state is dead. Long Live the (neoliberal) state.

Another Thomas Lemke quote below, which helps me to get a better grip on Neoliberalism as a political rationality:

For Foucault the state itself is a "technology of government"; since it is "the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on, thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality." The perspective of governmentality makes possible the development of a dynamic form of analysis that does not limit itself to stating the "retreat of politics" of the "domination of the market," but deciphers the so-called "end of politics" itself as a political program. The crisis of Keynesianism and the dismantling of welfare state forms of intervention lead less to a loss of the state's capacity to govern than to a reorganization or restructuring of technologies of government. This theoretical stance allows for a more complex analysis of neoliberal forms of government that feature not only direct intervention by means of empowered and specialized state apparatuses, but also characteristically develop indirect techniques for directing and controlling individuals. The strategy of rendering individual subjetcs (and also collectives, such as families, associations, etc.) "responsible" entails shifting the responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc. and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible, transforming it into a problem of "self-care." This form of individualization is therefore not outside the state. Likewise, the differences between the state and civil society, national regulation, and transnational agencies do not represent the basis and limits of practices of government, but rather function as their elements and effects.

Thomas Lemke

So, in contrast to political theories and projects which position, so as to critique and oppose, economic rationalism as the abandonment of supportive and social justice roles of the regulative state through deregulation and privatisation, the advantage of Foucault's 'governmentality' concept is that it explains what always seemed to be the contradiction of a deregulating and privatising government (I'm referring here to the Liberal-National Party Australian Federal Government - 1996-2007), increasing in size and increasing its regulatory regimes (eg. The phone book thick deregulatory industrial relations legislation: Workchoices) while presenting itself as the party of freedom from state interference.

Foucault understood neoliberal technologies of government as a transformation of the social rather than its end. The concept of governmentality allows us to call attention to the constitution of new political forms and levels of the state such as the introduction of systems of negotiation, mechanisms of self-organization, and empowerment strategies . . . [O]n the basis of the concept of governmentality, it can also be shown that privatization and deregulation do not follow economic imperatives so much as political strategies. Paradoxically, the critique of neoliberalism itself most often falls back on economic models of argumentation. The concept of governmentality proves to be useful in correcting the diagnosis of neoliberalism as an expansion of the economy into politics which takes for granted the separation of the state and market. The argument goes that there is some "pure" and "anarchic" economy that has to be "regulated" or "civilized" by a political response by society. Marx already demonstrated that such a position is untenable in his critique of political economy. Foucault's "critique of political reason" takes up the lines of this tradition. The transformation of the relations of economics and politics are therefore not to be investigated as the result of objective economic laws, but from the perspective of a transformation of social power relations. In short, instead of the power of the economy, the analytic of governmentality returns the focus to the "economy of power."

Lemke

The key point here is that Lemke is distinguishing between the social democratic critique of neoliberalism which figures a monolithic economic and financial machinery that forces nation-states to comply to its demands for labour flexibility and minimal environmental and capital controls, and a critique of neoliberal governmentality which figures the state (and citizen-subject) as constituted by techniques of market political reasoning and rationality. For example, within the current Federal Opposition leadership team, the Leader - Brendan Nelson - and shadow treasurer - Malcolm Turnbull, were referred to on ABC radio as the Opposition's key salesmen. The rationality, or logic, of this figuring of political technique in market terms is that the sphere of publicness in which these two representatives of the Opposition political party in Australia's Westminister-based Constitutional democracy are performing is actually a market-place where the citizenry are actually customers buying brands and goods. As Wendy Brown argues neoliberalism as political rationality is profoundly de-democratizing.

Critiques that seek to re-regulate what has been painted as de-regulation miss the extent to which neoliberalism's "economy of power", as Lemke puts it, is also operated through the semantics of not just "flexibility", but everyday "risk-assessment", "fitness", and "self-management." These are terms of 'mentality' in Foucault's 'govern-mentality', and comprise modes of subject-formation, or Bildungs, under neoliberalism.

We need a semantics and discourse, narratives too, that make claims on states, including the coming transnational ones, to regulate and govern without resorting to justifications in terms of market rationalities and without being always measured against the chronotope of the perfect commodity exchange with its atopian model of instantaneous, transparency under conditions of exact equality. But perhaps we first have to experience such forms of claim-making as rhythms, and follow Jaques Attali's lead in considering that music is prophecy.

I'd like to think that after neoliberalism there is the possibility of sustained sequences of eurhythmia - when social temporalities harmonise - which sounds like the Necks.

Thomas Lemke on neoliberalism - the semantics of flexibility

Over at Recording Surface Wendy Brown's illuminating essay on neoliberalism as a political rationality [“Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1] is under consideration.

Brown draws on Thomas Lemke's writings for key concepts with which to think neoliberalism as a political rationality and form of governmentality. Lemke has an excellent website with many of his journal articles available to read and download.

Here's Lemke from 'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality.':

[T]he theoretical strength of the concept of governmentality consists of the fact that it construes neo-liberalism not just as ideological rhetoric or as a political-economic reality, but above all as a political project that endeavours to create a social reality that it suggests already exists. Neo-liberalism is a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘self-care’. In this way, we can decipher the neo-liberal harmony in which not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and institutions (public administrations, universities, etc.), corporations and states have to be ‘lean’, ‘fit’, ‘flexible’ and ‘autonomous’: it is a technique of power. The analysis of governmentality not only focuses on the integral link between micro- and macro-political levels (e.g. globalization or competition for ‘attractive’ sites for companies and personal imperatives as regards beauty or a regimented diet), it also highlights the intimate relationship between ‘ideological’ and ‘political-economic’ agencies (e.g. the semantics of flexibility and the introduction of new structures of production). This enables us to shed sharper light on the effects neo-liberal governmentality has in terms of (self-) regulation and domination. These effects entail not just the simple reproduction of existing asymmetries or their ideological obfuscation, but are the product of a re-coding of social mechanisms of exploitation and domination on the basis of a new topography of the social domain.

Thomas Lemke “'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality.” Economy and Society. 30.2: 190-207. p203. Emphasis added.

Narrativising neoliberalism: Australian Bildungsromane of the Long Labor Decade.

One powerful way that the govermentality of neo-liberalism happens, and is contested, in Australia is through the narrative genre of the coming-of-age novel, or the Bildungsroman. In particular it is journalist, editor and historian Paul Kelly’s 1992 journalistic-history of Australian Federal politics in the 1980s – The End of certainty in which a narrativization of nation is written through key conventions of the classical Bildungsroman form, and which persuasively carry the discursive temporal forms of neoliberalism. Next I will suggest that the publication of the germinal Grunge fiction novel – Andrew McGahan’s Praise, in the same year 1992 - signals a literary fictional attack on the classical Bildungsroman form in a period when this key narrative genre of modernity and modernisation is being redeployed in the service of neo-liberalising Australia. Alongside Praise, Christos Tsiolkas’1995 novel Loaded also performs a failed bildungs, and both novels present symbols and figures of abjection and atopia – disease, drug trips and transgressive sex. These figures of illness and transgression can be read as symbolic forms complicating such tropes of neoliberalism as a healthy, growing, flexible economy or the clean float of the Australian dollar. The third part of my argument places Elliot Perlman’s 1998 novel Three dollars into a comparison with Kelly’s text, and I will argue here that Three dollars is ultimately unsuccessful in providing a literary fiction critique of neoliberalism because the ground from which its critique is issued has disappeared. The last section of my paper attempts to bring these four texts together, and argues that Andrew McCann’s 2005 novel Subtopia is a grunge Bildungsroman that in presenting its narrator/hero as deformed by disease, drug trips and transgressive sex – three key symbolic forms of grunge lit – decompresses the historical emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s and early 1990s so that we might read how this now dominant mode of governmentality can deform the narrating subject’s life narrative.

So, neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality. For Wendy Brown, drawing on Foucault, Neoliberalism :

Is not simply a set of economic policies; it is not only about facilitating free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism. Rather,neo-liberalism carries a social analysis which, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire. Neo-liberal rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; rather it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player. (‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’)

As Brown’s definition puts it, neoliberalism is not to be confused with the laissez faire economic liberalism of Adam Smith’s self-regulating invisible hand of the market, nor with the widely popular view that neoliberalism amounts to the deregulatory, dessertion of the economy by the State. Rather, neoliberalism is a mode of political reason or rationality that refigures the state, the social and the subject as entrepreneurial, and able to marketized. Nikolas Rose sums up neoliberalism’s key slogan as ‘obliged to be free’, a phrase which captures something of the redirection of regulation by an Ethical state which civilises and ameliorates the effects of capitalism, as Marian Sawer argues is the legacy of Social Liberalism in Australia, to one that engages in the formation of subjects who are self-managing, and self-regulating.

This sense then that neoliberalism operates in the formation of subjects would suggest that the shift from a social liberal and largely Labourist political culture informing a Keynesian project of macroeconomic management throughout much of the post world War II period in Australia, the shift from this culture to a neoliberal one is a shift that happens at the level of subject-formation, or bildungs.

In Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty this bildungs is tracked both at the level of the key events of the 1980s:including the financialisation of the Australian economy; the rise of the New right and its associated Think tanks; the Prices and Incomes Accords, the dropping of Tariff protection – and, more importantly, this formation of neoliberal governmentality is narrativized in terms of the whole post-federation period. For Kelly,

The story of the 1980s is the attempt to remake the Australian political tradition. This decade saw the collapse of the ideas which Australia had embraced nearly a century before and which had shaped the condition of its people. The 1980s was a time of both exhilaration and pessimism, but the central message shining through its convulsions was the obsolescence of the old order and the promotion of new political ideas as the basis for a new Australia. The generation after Federation in 1901 turned an emerging national consensus into new laws and institutions. This was the Australian Settlement. Its principle architect was Alfred Deakin.

In Kelly’s post-federation story, the 1980s is the moment when the Deakinite, or as Kelly influentially rewrites it, the Australian Settlement, is being dismantled by the force of international markets, especially in finance, and provides the moment in which the nation can finally come of age:

Two trends coalesced during the 1980s – the internationalisation of the world economy in which success became the survival of the fittest; and the gradual but inexorable weakening of Australia’s ‘imperial’ links with its two patrons, Britain and America. The message was manifest – Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood – the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate.

The obsolescence of the old order is documented. Since Federation Australia has failed to sustain its high standard of living compared with other nations. Australia’s economic problems are not new; they are certainly not the result of the 1980s, the 1970s, or the 1960s. The malaise stretches back much further to the post Federation Settlement. Australia’s economic problem is a ninety-year-old problem. The legacy of the Settlement has been relative economic decline throughout the century. Australia is a paradox – a young nation with geriatric arteries.

Now, these quotes are from the introduction to Kelly’s book in which he sets out his framing-argument for the long-overdue modernisation of the Australian economy and political culture. This introduction expands on his key heuristic – the Australian Settlement Which is repeatedly accompanied by verbs such as remaking, demolished, dismantled in the text. Kelly’s story of the 1980s is widely circulated and has come to serve as a definitive story of the inevitable, necessary modernisation of the Australian economy in the 1980s is due to more than just the power of Kelly’s rhetoric and key position in News Limited’s national broadsheet, I think it’s due also to his skillfull deployment of the poetics of the Bildungsroman form.

What is interesting in this narrative genre is the time and space from when and where the historian/ narrator looks back on a youthful life – a young nation - making the transition into adulthood – coming of age. Knowing the self that has become what it was always going to become, gives the narrator, telling the story of the hero’s’ emergence into maturity, the vantage of an Olympian certainty with which to make evaluative judgements on the younger self. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which Bakhtin considered to be the germinal novel in this genre, this narrating position is metafictionally presented in the text as being occupied by the Masonic, Aristocratic Society of the Tower. After his youthful wanderings, theatrical experiments, and brief romances, Wilhelm discovers that he has been engaged in an apprenticeship that has been directed and written by this Aristocratic Society. It is as though his formation, while presented in the novel as precarious and dramatic, was in fact scripted well in advance of these experiences by being written in this life-script. This narrating position has been described by Joseph Slaughter as a teleological-tautology: the hero is what she will become. Slaughter also calls this narrating position, narrating from the future-anterior.

In Part II of Kelly’s The End of Certainty ‘The economic crisis’ chapter 11 ‘The Banana republic’ the critical dramatic apex in the story is presented. Kelly writes:

The ‘Banana republic’ was a dose of shock therapy for the nation which for a while left a legacy of crisis which Labor could have utilised to impose tougher policies upon the nation. Labor felt it was heroic enough – its decisions were draconian by orthodox standards and its advisers were pleased. Hawke and Keating depicted themselves as bold warriors. But history will record that the times demanded more and would have given more.

It’s the strange mixture of temporality, history and times here that points to the position of Kelly’s evaluative voice as being issued from a future anterior, or in the mode of a teleological-tautology. Kelly is writing a history yet he defers his evaluative judgement of the policy responses of Hawke and Keating to the Banana republic crisis, to a history in the future, which Kelly knows with certainty will make the definitive evaluative judgement about what the times demanded: which is more. What I think is happening here is that this economic crisis, indexed by a 40% devaluation of the Australian dollar over eighteen months, is for Kelly a valuation judgement on the Australian dollar by the global currency market, whose demands about the future are registered in the investment decisions it makes in the present.

Kelly’s future anterior narrator shows its hand as being guided by neoliberalism’s market judgement. Effectively what Australia will become is to be judged by the degree to which neoliberal governmentality meets the needs of the international markets.

Michael Pusey has called economic rationalism a locust strike, and just to mix metaphors in an attempt at a segue, Pusey has also described economic rationalism as the process where the social is cast as a stubbornly resisting sludge that market rationality must be driven through. And so to Grunge.

If as, Franco Moretti argues in his study of the classical Bildungsroman from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, that this genre uses youth as a symbol for modernity and modernisation because with the French and Industrial Revolutions Europe is plunged into modernity but lacks a culture, then Kelly’s text can be read as personifying the nation as a youth on the cusp of modernisation – of providing the nation with a narrativisation of formation - as a means of insinuating the culture of neoliberalism into an Australia culture still, in parts, stubbornly resistant. This shift in the poetics of politics, as Jenna Mead succinctly sums up a critical approach to this field of textuality, I argue is met with a politics of poetics in the form of grunge literature – which I’ll refer to as Grunge lit. I’m just going to very quickly set out the three main characteristics of grunge lit that I want to pick up again at the end of this paper.

Grunge Lit is concerned, as Joan Kirkby and others have argued, with abjection. In both Praise and Loaded the narrator/ heroes are both young men on the cusp of adulthood –prime subjects for the Bildungsroman. However, both Gordon and Ari, break the first rule of neoliberalism by refusing to be obliged to choose a job. If it is healthy to have a job, then this refusal is the first sign of illness. Disease is central to Praise and its romantic leads, Cynthia and Gordon both have atopic illnesses: Eczema and Asthma. Atopic disease symbolises the deferred and displaced effects of pollution and waste; capitalism’s abjected and used-up by-products. At the end of Loaded Ari reflects on his life in the sewer, amongst the sludge and waste. The second chronotopic set in grunge lit revolves around drug experiences. Gordon’s main drug is the stimulant nicotine, but he and Cynthia move through heroin, LSD and lots of alcohol. Loaded, as the title suggests, is structured around scoring and taking drugs – from marijuana to ecstasy to speed. Apart being transgressive these representations of drug experiences present accelerations and decelerations of tempo. The decelerations play against the speed up of modernisation, while the rapid acceleration of stimulants performs a battle to outrun and think compressed time. Thirdly, both grunge novels figure pornographic sequences. The effect here is to transgress a simple and dominant heterosexuality. The central point here is that in Grunge lit the narrator never abjects these contaminating and arrhythmic phenomena from their narrative. As there is no successful Bildungs or formation in either novel, these abject and atopic symbols remain threateningly proximate to both the heroes’s body and to their futures.

This proximity to the atopic and abject in Grunge is nearly completely absent in the narrator/ hero of Eliot Perlman’s novel of 1998, Three Dollars. Three dollars has a temporal span of about 30 years and traverses the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Eddie Harnovey, the hero and narrator, tells the story of his life from the moment in and at which he and his nuclear family is almost destitute – having only three dollars. Perlman’s novel is a celebrated one, having won The Age book of the year, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and was recently voted best novel about Victoria (or maybe Melbourne) in a poll conducted by the Victorian State Library. A film adaptation was released in 2005 and it was at this point that Three Dollars began to act out its metafictional aspiration of becoming a literary narrative through which a critical rational discussion of economic rationalism would be staged. Keith Windschuttle used the novel to argue for the privatisation of the ABC as one way to closed down the sort of cultural elitism that he argued Perlman’s novel represented, while Greg Sheridan in The Australian pointed out how unrealistic this realism was when its hero could go from a reasonably comfortable middle-class existence to almost homelessness in the space of days. On the other hand Ken Gelder, in an Overland essay last year, invoked Mark Davis’ call for a genuinely popular critique of neoliberal marketisation; Leigh Dale also supported Davis’ call in an ASAL panel on postcolonialism. In this essay Gelder argues that while the novel might be taken up on the Left as the closest recent example of a critical political realism, its resolution is conservative with Eddie returned to his wife and child, safe and with the prospect of a job, high up in the human resources department in an unamed bank after being sacked from his Federal government job for leaking to the media his rejected critical report on proposed Smelter development.

Unlike the highly compressed temporal spans of Praise and especially Loaded (24 hours), Three Dollars spans around 30 years, and its critique of neoliberalism is both explicit and profoundly disabled by its formal politics – the politics of its poetics. The central problem with the novel is that it adopts the Bildungsroman convention of a future-anterior narrating position from which to tell a story not of the hero’s formation, but of the hero’s integrity while the Australian public sphere is de-formed by neoliberalism. Seemingly without irony Eddie tells us that ‘I understood that secular humanism, liberalism and social justice had not abandoned me . . . it was just that everybody had abandoned them.’ Eddie is not presented as emerging along with history, as Bakhtin argues is central to the Bildungsroman, but as already formed through the civilising Culture of an Arnoldian-Leavisite project enabling Eddie to retain a clean ethical grasp on his sense of civilisation and integrity: a capacity for ethical judgement which is metafictionally founded on Arnoldian touchstones like Shakespeare and the Hamlet plot that Eddie inhabits. Perlman’s narrator takes on the form of the future anterior but uses it to narrate from the fantasy of a universal and transcendent humanistic culture that is capable of providing the means for civilising capitalism. As Terry Eagleton argues in The function of criticism ‘What Scrutiny [the Leavis’s journal] represented . . . was nothing less than an attempt to reinvent the classical public sphere, at a time when its material conditions had definitively passed.’ Three dollars therefore doubles this melancholic longing for the classical literary public sphere that Leavis also struggled to revive.

While the classical public sphere relied on a naturalised and strictly policed distinction between Economy and Culture, neoliberalism functions through an enculturation, or formation, of the subject as entrepreneurial, flexible, productive, self-managing, and accountable. Culture, like the State, becomes an object of market political rationality in the 1980s and 90s and in Three dollars nearly all the main characters except Eddie become subject to this emergent structure of feeling, which manifests itself, most strongly, in Eddie’s wife Tanya’s depression. Tanya struggles with the onset of neoliberalism both as managerial practice at University and as the subject of her unfinished doctoral thesis on the death of political economics. While Tanya’s experience of neoliberalism is felt as depression, it is their child Abby’s epileptic-like fit that signals an analogy with what Paul Kelly calls the convulsions of the 1980s. But the diseases in Three dollars are always distant from Eddie, whose bildungs is not neoliberal but Leavisite, and therefore is able to redeem his family from its proximity to neoliberalism by staying true to his humanism and remaining unstained.

Finally, Andrew McCann’s 2005 novel Subtopia permits its hero/ narrator Julian Farrell to be proximate to the three aspects of grunge lit I mentioned before. Also a Bildungsroman that spans the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Subtopia is haunted not by the spirit of Leavis but by Adorno’s aesthetics. The novel begins with the story’s chronological ending, denaturalising the future-anterior of the classical bilduingsroman:

In the end, I had the disconcerting sense that I had started to outlive myself. I suppose that’s how I knew it was the end. It’s not much of a way to conclude. I should have grown up, come to my senses, come of age (as you do), or fucked off for good. I was pushing thirty, for Christ’s sake. But in the end, so the cliché goes, there is no end. At least nothing we can own up to. A bit of self-indulgent bullshit about perpetual becoming or mutual understanding, a nice rhetorical flourish, and no one seems to notice just how inconclusive our experiences really are, which is not to say that they aren’t also full of danger. (Subtopia)

As in Praise and Loaded disease, drug use and pornography are prominent and proximate symbols of: the abject and atopic; time-tripping and here the libidinal charge of terrorist-revolutionary politics, represented in the narrator’s sexual fascination with Ulrike Meinhoff and a mentally ill Berliner. Unlike Eddie in Three Dollars Julian’s attempted transitions from youth to maturity are never achieved.

The effect of using the Bildungsroman form, as McCann does here, without completing the hero’s formation and by drawing attention to some of the conventions of this genre, is to enable a reading that can raise questions about a National coming of age which appears to have already been written by the investment projections of the international financial markets: neoliberalism’s version of Wilhelm Meister’s Society of the Tower writing his life-script. Also by derailing the teleology of a naturalised coming of age pulled into the future, other more unsettling chronotopes are given the time to work into the narrative and perhaps provide ways to think around or even through neoliberalism’s dominant hold on culture.

[from ASAL July 2007 Conference, UQ]